4 ms·

Ask HN: What reasons do you have for not moving to the cloud?

8 points by arnon 7y ago

If you're working on-prem, what are your reasons for staying there, rather than moving to the cloud?

jmnicolas 7y ago
- Internet down, nobody can work (it happens to us once or twice a year, between a few minutes and a few hours). - latency : we have one cloud app that is a pain to use since latency and sometimes bandwidth are not good enough (it got better since we got fiber, but still). - our suppliers are very old school (one of them is still using Visual Studio 2008 for crying out loud) : we have to work around them, even "despite" them in certain instances. - costs would not go down, they certainly would go up for a "worse" service The only thing that cloud would give me is the peace of mind of not having to manage servers (if everything was serverless or managed by suppliers that is).
- arnon 7y ago
  Assuming you go full "SaaS" - are you really saving IT resources, or are they just going to be doing other things on a different platform?
  - jmnicolas 7y ago
    Sorry I don't understand your question.
notlukesky 7y ago
In many markets there are regulatory regimes that prevent a migration to the cloud especially in sectors like banking and government departments.
- arnon 7y ago
  It seems that even in Germany and France, many finance companies are moving to the cloud. Is this still a problem today?
  - huhnmonster 7y ago
    From my own experience (finance), still no cloud services in use. It is strictly forbidden to share any data with the outside world, whether that be in the form of Google Sheets or some other platform outside of a corporate network. If something moves out, shit hits the fan pretty quickly, once someone finds out. Everything not on-premise is a no-go from the start, which sucks.
gitgud 7y ago
There's still laws in some countries which require; on site storage, data-center in the country, weird periodic audits... All these are barriers to moving to the cloud
muzani 7y ago
One company I worked with had been around before cloud. They had plenty of server space (about a few building levels of servers) and even a backup power generator. I suppose they would move to cloud if they could, but at that level of scale and uptime, they might as well be the cloud.
segmondy 7y ago
Money. I have a $5 VPS for my personal stuff. If I ever have anything else that needs more computing power than that, I'm going to run it from a server under my desk unless people pay enough to cover the cost.
- quickthrower2 7y ago
  I'm using the Digital Ocean $5/month on a site, running Nginx & NodeJS, admittedly low load but boy the uptime has been great and $5/m. Just create an ubuntu droplet, couple of apt-get commands and you are up and running with a server :-).
peterbozso 7y ago
As a consultant I work almost exclusively with enterprise customers using Azure. When moving to the cloud for some of them the most regular reasons to keep stuff on-prem are: * Regulation: it's mostly about data can't leave the given country's border. There's usually not much you can do about it. Offload stuff to the cloud what you can (computing), keep on-prem what you must (data). In these cases the integration between the two environments can be a real challenge sometimes. But Azure is quite strong on that front. * Stupid company policies set up during the last century or recently, but by people stuck in the last century. In some cases these can either be worked around or changed if you know the right people. But there's a lot of cases when it's hopeless from the start. Totally depends on company culture.
ludjer 7y ago
- High single instance reliability. I have ~1000 EC2 instances; every week I get a notification how an instance has been restarted to move it off failing hardware. I never got these in my DC - Consistent large scale workloads at low latency. Nothing beats low latency then bare-metal servers. Also, it costs significantly cheaper running large clusters on bare-metal then in the cloud. If you move to the cloud, you need to use the cloud services else your costs are astronomically higher. - If you already have datacenters that have been paid off why move to the cloud. Use your own data centers and run a hybrid cloud. I think there is a reason allot of big tech companies roll their own cloud or do some kind of hybrid approach. Whe nyou running a app that is core to your infrastructure you do not want to rely on another persons hardware you want 100% control of everything. I have had route 53 cause issues, S3 cause issues, EC2 servers get stuck and there is nothing you can do but wait 15 min for the enterprise SLA of AWS. In a business critical system, 15 min is not good enough. You need your operations techie to be sprinting to the rack to hit the reset button. Just my experience.
sloaken 7y ago
Quality of internet - little to no redundency if the primary drops. Speed of internet. Trust that cloud companies are not: A) Selling my info B) Using it against me
billconan 7y ago
data/source code security cost saving.

8 points by arnon 7y ago

If you're working on-prem, what are your reasons for staying there, rather than moving to the cloud?

- Internet down, nobody can work (it happens to us once or twice a year, between a few minutes and a few hours). - latency : we have one cloud app that is a pain to use since latency and sometimes bandwidth are not good enough (it got better since we got fiber, but still). - our suppliers are very old school (one of them is still using Visual Studio 2008 for crying out loud) : we have to work around them, even "despite" them in certain instances. - costs would not go down, they certainly would go up for a "worse" service The only thing that cloud would give me is the peace of mind of not having to manage servers (if everything was serverless or managed by suppliers that is).

arnon 7y ago
Assuming you go full "SaaS" - are you really saving IT resources, or are they just going to be doing other things on a different platform?
- jmnicolas 7y ago
  Sorry I don't understand your question.

notlukesky 7y ago

In many markets there are regulatory regimes that prevent a migration to the cloud especially in sectors like banking and government departments.

arnon 7y ago
It seems that even in Germany and France, many finance companies are moving to the cloud. Is this still a problem today?
- huhnmonster 7y ago
  From my own experience (finance), still no cloud services in use. It is strictly forbidden to share any data with the outside world, whether that be in the form of Google Sheets or some other platform outside of a corporate network. If something moves out, shit hits the fan pretty quickly, once someone finds out. Everything not on-premise is a no-go from the start, which sucks.

gitgud 7y ago

There's still laws in some countries which require; on site storage, data-center in the country, weird periodic audits... All these are barriers to moving to the cloud

muzani 7y ago

One company I worked with had been around before cloud. They had plenty of server space (about a few building levels of servers) and even a backup power generator. I suppose they would move to cloud if they could, but at that level of scale and uptime, they might as well be the cloud.

segmondy 7y ago

Money. I have a $5 VPS for my personal stuff. If I ever have anything else that needs more computing power than that, I'm going to run it from a server under my desk unless people pay enough to cover the cost.

quickthrower2 7y ago
I'm using the Digital Ocean $5/month on a site, running Nginx & NodeJS, admittedly low load but boy the uptime has been great and $5/m. Just create an ubuntu droplet, couple of apt-get commands and you are up and running with a server :-).

peterbozso 7y ago

As a consultant I work almost exclusively with enterprise customers using Azure. When moving to the cloud for some of them the most regular reasons to keep stuff on-prem are: * Regulation: it's mostly about data can't leave the given country's border. There's usually not much you can do about it. Offload stuff to the cloud what you can (computing), keep on-prem what you must (data). In these cases the integration between the two environments can be a real challenge sometimes. But Azure is quite strong on that front. * Stupid company policies set up during the last century or recently, but by people stuck in the last century. In some cases these can either be worked around or changed if you know the right people. But there's a lot of cases when it's hopeless from the start. Totally depends on company culture.

ludjer 7y ago

- High single instance reliability. I have ~1000 EC2 instances; every week I get a notification how an instance has been restarted to move it off failing hardware. I never got these in my DC - Consistent large scale workloads at low latency. Nothing beats low latency then bare-metal servers. Also, it costs significantly cheaper running large clusters on bare-metal then in the cloud. If you move to the cloud, you need to use the cloud services else your costs are astronomically higher. - If you already have datacenters that have been paid off why move to the cloud. Use your own data centers and run a hybrid cloud. I think there is a reason allot of big tech companies roll their own cloud or do some kind of hybrid approach. Whe nyou running a app that is core to your infrastructure you do not want to rely on another persons hardware you want 100% control of everything. I have had route 53 cause issues, S3 cause issues, EC2 servers get stuck and there is nothing you can do but wait 15 min for the enterprise SLA of AWS. In a business critical system, 15 min is not good enough. You need your operations techie to be sprinting to the rack to hit the reset button. Just my experience.

sloaken 7y ago

Quality of internet - little to no redundency if the primary drops. Speed of internet. Trust that cloud companies are not: A) Selling my info B) Using it against me

billconan 7y ago

data/source code security cost saving.